Widescreen Wallpapers

Confession: Until a few days ago, I’d never calibrated my TV. There are a couple reasons for this. First, and most simply, I’m not down with buying a calibration disc that I will likely use once then never touch again. And second, to me, HDTV calibration is the gadget geek’s equivalent to chasing the dragon. I’ve seen endless A/V forum posts of new TV owners begging and pleading for that one true setting for their new high-definition slab—it’s not pretty. There is an easy way, though, tucked inside hundreds of THX-certified DVDs already out there, and it’s quite possibly already in your movie collection.

The THX Optimizer is a quick and simple calibration tool that I have found gets the job done well enough for most of us non-fanatics. And it comes with a free movie! (OK, it comes free with a movie.) What is it? It’s a set of six test patterns that help you choose the key settings for any HDTV calibration: contrast, brightness, tint and sharpness.

Where to get it: THX has been quietly embedding the Optimizer in just about every THX-certified DVD for years—so that’s hundreds. There’s a complete list here, but it hasn’t been updated in a while, because THX is currently refreshing the Optimizer for high-def discs. The only Blu-ray disc currently carrying it is Terminator 2, but when the new version is done, THX will include it on all THX-ceritified BDs, too. Point is, in all, there’s probably at least one movie you’d like to own that happens to come with the Optimizer.

One other thing you’ll need: To take full advantage of the Optimizer for the tint settings, you’ll need some funky blue-filter glasses. THX will send you a pair for a couple of bucks on their website, though there is an additional color pattern in the Optimizer that you can use to eyeball your settings without the glasses—basically, you just make sure that cyan and magenta look as much like the cyan and magenta of your dreams. If you don’t feel like you can be trusted with that judgment, it’s probably worth it to spend the $4 or so.

Settings you’ll want to start with: The good news is, the Optimizer works with pretty much every TV in the world, from your grandma’s 19-inch Sony Trinitron to your brand-new 60-inch Kuro. (Yeah, you wish.) I would reset your TV’s settings to the factory default before running the Optimizer, and I would also choose to calibrate your set’s movie/film/cinema pre-set (if possible), as it should be closer to the ballpark range than the “standard” mode. But if you prefer the usually cooler color temperatures of the standard mode, running it through the Optimizer will at least ensure that its ferocious showroom-floor contrast and brightness will be tamed.

Be sure that any auto-contrast or auto-backlight settings—including any settings with the words “dynamic” or “ambient”—are turned off. In one test scenario, every adjustment we tried to make was immediately be countered by “smart” settings—it was nearly impossible to calibrate the TV correctly. If your set comes with those options, shut ‘em down. And leave ‘em down.

It also helps to try and run the Optimizer in lighting conditions that best match your usual TV-watching state. Everyone watches TV both during the day and at night, so this won’t be perfect. But a happy medium of the shades drawn on a partly cloudy day seemed to work nicely for me.

After you’ve got everything set up, it’s a pretty simple run-through—turn up contrast until just the point where can still see six white-shaded blocks without them merging together, turn down brightness until the last black block out of a different row of six disappears, etc. All of the tests are easy enough to understand for the layman.

But does it work? My Samsung Series 4 LCD now looks a lot better in movie mode, without a doubt. Where it used to look flat and the colors muddy, now blacks look blacker and colors more contrasty, but in a far more natural way than the “dynamic” preset.

Note that this before and after of a still from T2 is not a scientific comparison by any means: the camera’s exposure settings are the same in each unprocessed photograph, so the screen image should be fairly accurate, but the room’s lighting had changed a bit by the time I was done calibrating as you can see. But on the screen you can still see the darker blacks and better color saturation and contrast that I noticed in person.

So even if the difference is subtle, it’s worth doing. Especially since you didn’t drop money on a calibration disc, you either bought a THX-certified movie, or dug one out of your existing pile o’ DVDs. (Netflixing a known Optimizer-laden title is a cheap third option, of course.) And those demons screaming at you about the huge potential you’re missing by not calibrating your set? You can put those to rest. [THX]

More Advice for the Black Friday Fray:
• The aforementioned Ultimate Survival Guide.
• 5 Gadgets You Can’t Skimp On (And How to Save Money Buying Them)
• Best of Black Friday Deals Complete Roundup“>All the best deals in one place
• Plus these late breaking ones from Cupertino: Apple Black Friday Deals Include Some Decent Third-Party Discounts
• Warnings: 7 Crappy Black Friday “Deals” That Aren’t Really
• How To Choose an HDTV on Black Friday (or Any Day)
• How to set up that new HDTV you just got.

Photochop Contest:
• Brutally Honest Black Friday Ads Showcase Retailers on the Brink

Why You Might Want to Avoid Shopping on Black Friday, altogether:
• 10 Reasons We’re Doomed: Black Friday Edition
• WalMart Worker Trampled to Death by Deal-Crazed Black Friday Shoppers

[Complete Black Friday Gadget Coverage at Giz]

Samsung has five new large-sized touchscreen LCDs out that could bring something similar to CNN’s Magic Wall into your own home (or mall, or airport). Branded under the TS series, the five LCDs range between 32-inches to 82-inches and can be linked together to create one massive wall of touchy goodness. While they’re made to be used as point-of-sale terminals or information LCDs, who’s to say we couldn’t find something more creative to do if we got our grubby hands on them? [Akihabra News]

OLED screens are pretty awesome all around, but they have more than a few Achilles Heels to overcome before they’re accepted into the mainstream. That said, one of the hurdles has allegedly fallen this weekend, thanks to new research out of South Korea. According to the AP, South Korean scientists have developed an efficient “true blue” material that, while sounding like a 1991 Madonna album, is actually a pretty important step forward for OLEDs.

You see, OLEDs, for all their potential greatness, have a heck of a time producing the blue light necessary to produce great images (red, green, blue light makes TVs happy!). Red and green light works fine, but blue remained elusive. That’s where the South Koreans come in.

The discovery was the work of Pusan National University chemistry professor Jin Sung-Ho, who said the discovery was an important one for advancing the energy efficiency of OLEDs. For gadget lovers, it’s yet another piece of the puzzle that, when completed, will mean powerful, beautiful OLED TVs are a mainstay in homes across the world. [AFP]

Our friend Gary Merson at HD Guru has compiled a list of super great prices on top-branded HDTVs, like a Samsung 40″ Series 5 1080p LCD at Circuit City for $800, a Sharp 46″ 1080p for around $900 at Best Buy, and a 50″ Panasonic 720p plasma for $988 at Sixth Avenue Electronics. If you want to spend more than a $1000 on a bigger, better, TV, check out Gary’s full list of today’s deals, and don’t forget to check out yesterday’s deals too. [HD Guru]

While many of us have our collection of nice electronic toys, most of us can’t afford to walk into a store, take a look at a company like Sony’s complete line of Bravia media add-ons and walk out with it all. And your conscience might stop you anyway—even if your wallet could take the hit, you know enough to look around at other respectable brands, maybe some Samsung or LG equipment, and make a more informed decision.

Well today we’re taking the role of “that guy” for you. Sony shipped us their latest Bravia LCD TV along with all of its modular Link components: a wireless HDMI streamer, their internet video player, an HDMI port expander and an extra slim DVD player—a set of matching electronics designed to hook nicely to the back of your Bravia TV while integrating with the display at a software level.

Setting Up

After fervently unpacking five cardboard boxes and dusting the styrofoam specs off of the jet black components, I remembered just how nice Sony’s equipment can be. Everything feels solid in the hands, everything matches with the same amount of gloss and everything has the shining Sony logo that was the beacon for technological enlightenment to anyone who lived through the 80s.

But I am disappointed.

I know that most all of this stuff is supposed to hook right to the back of the television, yet I have no natural inclination as to how that happens. I see screws, flimsy clear plastic tracks and manuals in three different languages. I swallow my pride and open one up (and it’s a good thing I did).

Starting with the DVD player, I learned that one must screw a mount into the television, screw the component into the mount and then make sure to plug in the three or more cords to make it work.

What? This isn’t what I pictured at all. I wanted to equip this TV like a gun. I wanted to lock and load, hear the fulfilling clank of metal on metal and live a Rambo montage while I prepped for an onslaught of 1080p. Instead, I was fiddling with screws and wires, scratching up my entertainment stand in a precarious position while making my sleek beautiful new TV resemble the trash bin of a wire factory.

The feeling was akin to any time you’ve bought cereal for the toy, only to realize that the toy was really just a 2-cent piece of rubber. And by the way, that box of cereal just cost you $3,500.

Bravia Internet Video Link - $300

The Bravia Internet Video Link was maybe the most indulgent component I had to test, mostly because I would personally never purchase this component on my own. Why?

1. It’s essentially a box that puts streaming video like YouTube onto your TV (which is done by many other components as a second function) and

2. It works exclusively with Bravia TVs. The Internet Video Link uses the television’s DMXe (USB) port and fits the content into the TV’s XMB menu system.

Yet my alternate persona, my big spender identity who sucked down a $5 iced coffee while writing this review, enjoyed the IVL.

It really is ingenious that the system works within the television’s menu system. In fact, it doesn’t even have a menu system of its own. Utilizing the TV’s XMB (Cross Media Bar), the interface is not so different than the PS3. Flipping through the list of content providers made way for a very intuitive experience in which I click any content provider that looks interesting, from AP to cooking classes. Once I select a clip from within their menu, fast forwarding through content or skipping ahead is extremely responsive with the user interface acknowledging my commands smoothly while allowing the clips time to buffer.

Sure, most of the content looks like crap, the compressed YouTube clips especially. But Sony’s understated blue skin framed it well, adding a bit of class to often tacky content.

Especially with Amazon Unbox (tested in beta here), we see Sony’s design touch can add a lot to the experience. While managing Unbox content is a pain on my TiVo, the Internet Link puts a pleasant icon skin on your media and has a multitude of simple to navigate categories that makes it all palatable. Plus, you get the same navigation bar in Unbox as you do in YouTube or any other of the services, simplifying the experience of viewing dozens of different content feeds. Simply, it’s the best presentation of Unbox I’ve seen to date.

I’m happy again. The world is rainbows and sunshine.

Then the practical side of me kicks in. I spit out the Brazilian coffee (most of it gone by now, to be honest) and realize I’ve been hoodwinked. Why didn’t the PS3 have all of these neat internet video channels in its XMB? I had no answer.

Bravia Wireless Link - $800

Regardless of how things may have gone with the Internet Link, I was ready to move on to the Wireless Link. It’s a piece of equipment that we all hope will be a mainstay in every home within 5 years. The system streams HDMI and component video wirelessly, allowing you to reroute that DVR to a different room while maintaining a pristine HD image.

I knew there would be catches. Even $5 coffee guy could understand that the HD video would be limited to 1080i streaming, nixing the dream of watching Blu-rays in the bedroom. The second catch is even bigger. The Wireless Link transmitter does not double as an HDMI port splitter. This is a vital point, as it means that you can’t double dip your home theater to two televisions. Even if it’s 1 foot away, the components plug in to the transmitter, and the receiver accepts the data wirelessly.

Combine no hardline output with the 1080i transfer limitations and you realize that all content you watch will all be in 1080i.

OK, but I’m still enthused. After all, I didn’t pay for this stuff. So I put it through the most rigorous test I can imagine. I play the final levels of Gears of War 2, streaming my 720p component connection from my Xbox in my living room to my TV in my bedroom (a distance of only 10 or so feet). Still, the Wireless Link really impressed me.

There’s no discernible lag. Maybe if I’d been playing online in some pro tournament, I’d have noticed a slight disadvantage. But as far as I could tell, the Xbox is hooked right into the TV I’m was using. And the image quality is just as good as it had looked when I had the system hardwired.

Sony explained later that the delay between the base station and a receiver was less than one millisecond—that’s faster than most LCDs can draw the image being transmitted. Not bad, Sony. My 5GHz Wireless-N network didn’t even interfere, as you’d warned me could happen.

But again, there’s a catch where some engineer didn’t think things through all the way. I couldn’t stream my PS3 at all. Neither Blu-ray nor games worked, even when I reduced the resolution from 1080p. I could catch the signal for a moment or two, then the system would give me a “not supported” message.

UPDATE: My streaming problem was evidently an HDCP issue with the Link and a Samsung television. On the Bravia set, the PlayStation 3 functioned properly. Like all of the Bravia Link components, the Wireless Link is really not designed/tested to be taken beyond the Bravia infrastructure.

Bravia DVD Player - $200

Even my yuppie alter ego wasn’t fooled by this one. The Bravia DVD Link may be called a link, but I know better. I know a DVD player when I see one.

Sony does promise a a few advantages with their Bravia branded item, of course. The first I discussed above, that the player could mount to the back of your set (be it in a not so glamorous way). The second is that, like the Internet Movie Link, the DVD component can hook to the television through the USB-based DMXe port.

Wait, I should rephrase this, the DVD Link needs to hook to the TV through DMXe. It won’t work at all otherwise. And that’s a problem, as the television only has one DMXe port.

So even though I have the HDMI hooked up correctly and even though I know most DVD players don’t need USB connections to work, I am sitting here, pounding on the DVD remote that does nothing (yet, the DVD menu still auto-loads with “play movie” highlighted but unclickable, which just spites me more). The techie me is upset. The yuppie me is livid pissed.

When the DVD Link is plugged in and working happily, it’s fine. It’s pretty much as good as any other DVD player. If you hit the “display” button on the remote, it tweaks your TV’s display, as opposed to messing with DVD player options. I guess there’s an advantage to this, a certain technological configuration efficiency. But the benefit is small, and to quote the words of my truly yuppie wife, “It doesn’t even play Blu-ray??”

Input Link - $150

The Input Link isn’t the most glamorous of Bravia accessories, but like the others, it does hook to the back of your TV after a bit of effort. It’s a 5X1 HDMI port expander. It matches the other Links. And it’s a hugely missed opportunity by Sony if you think about it. A module like this could sync with DMXe and mount your components straight into the XMB through Sony technical magic. Instead, it just offers some extra HDMI slots. But of all the mounting components, the Input Link seemed the most at home, fitting snugly and solidly near the inputs.

So Is It Worth It?

To be fair to Sony, $3,500 isn’t an absurd amount to spend on home theater equipment—especially when we break down the sheer amount of components we reviewed here and realize that it’s all name brand equipment.

But I look at the pile of electronics I’ve got, this mountain of Bravia, and I can’t help wishing it would do more or at least be a seamless experience to use.

I had more difficulty setting up the equipment than I have home theater components in years. For each component being design around the television, it certainly didn’t fit on the television very easily or even all that well.

And while Sony may or may not be on to something with their DMXe integration (I think they really could be, actually), they need to make sure that users who own more than one component—their most loyal customer base—aren’t being punished for it by limiting available DMXe inputs on Bravia TVs.

The thing is, I really like the Bravia television, the use of XMB for its menu system and the idea of Sony’s “Links” integrating with this very solid platform. And the Wireless Link, even at $800, is highly technically impressive and genuinely excites me about the future of home theater.

Yet at the end of the day, both my ignorant yuppie and shamelessly techie self can’t help but to look at my PS3 and wonder, why oh why can’t Sony focus all of their development into this machine—or at the very least, make using my TV as straightforward and gratifying as firing a loaded weapon?

The Zon is the latest in Nooka’s line of variously confusing and interesting (for a given value of beauty) timepieces: Its 35 x 45mm dot-matrix display either displays the minutes of the day dotting into nothingness like a digital egg-timer that’s counting down until tomorrow, or a proper numeric time readout. It also has a list of cities and timezones for travelling, and it’ll come in white or black, or a mirror-like display for extra confusion. Due next week for $650. [LikeCool]

It’s not every day that you get to check out the world’s thinnest LCD HDTV, let alone all three “ultrathins” currently in production, but that’s what’s going down. Sharp’s super insane new flagship, the Limited Edition Aquos LC-65XS1U-S, arrived at my door in a bulletproof shipping container, 138 pounds of metal and glass measuring 65 inches diagonal that you can barely see from the side. Yes, in spite of its full-frontal gravitas, it measures only an inch thick at its edge, and a slightly more flexed 2 inches in the middle. It’s gorgeous and ridiculous and designed to hang on a wall with no more protrusion than a dainty sketch in a frame—only it can blast Casino Royale at 1080p, 24 frames per second, while your face melts, and I’d have to sell my car twice over to buy it.

I love you Giz readers too much to stop with something that none of us can actually afford—and if you can afford it, you’ll be decent enough to not let us know—so I called in the new slender 1080p models from Hitachi and JVC, too. As much lower-priced sets, I thought they’d just be the icing on Sharp’s Limited Edition cake, but they turned out to be, in their own right, fine specimens. Let’s review, shall we?

Who Thin?
“Ultrathin” is best defined, at this moment, as a TV that is mostly thinner than 2 inches.

Hitachi’s Director’s Series 1.5 UltraThin UT37X902 (37 inches listing for $1,900) got its name because it’s an inch and a half thick across its entire panel. It is a monitor with speakers, but no tuner and the barest of inputs—one HDMI and one VGA—to help it keep trim. JVC’s LT-46SL89 (46 inches for $2,400) on the other hand is a true TV, with digital HD tuner, 3 HDMI ports, 2 analog inputs with option of component, composite or S-Video, and a PC VGA input. That adds a bit to the girth—while most of its main panel is one-and-three-quarter-inches thick, there’s a middle section that is a fat three inches.

To give you a sense of comparison, Pioneer’s fairly slim and lightweight first-gen Kuro plasma is nearly 4 inches thick, with a slimming bezel that measures about half that. Pioneer isn’t content there, though—its newest Kuro Elite monitors are quite trim, and you’ll recall last CES the company showed off an unbelievably thin half-inch plasma screen that’s presumably nowhere near production.

WTF Thin?
When I asked Sharp Aquos product manager Tony Favia what the fuss was about all of these new super thin TVs, he said that customers, particularly high-end ones, wanted a TV that could hang on a wall as flush as art, and even fill in for art as needed. That’s why Sharp loaded the XS1 with paintings: When you push “Image” on the remote, up pop masterworks by Hokusai, Renoir, Seurat and Van Gogh, about 10 or 12 total. You can’t leave the TV set on a particular image, though, despite the remote’s discreetly stashed Play/Pause/Fwd/Rew transport buttons.

The XS1 achieves its thinness in part by farming out its functionality: An accompanying AV box, tethered by a single long HDMI cable, doesn’t just handle all of the inputs, but the digital tuner and AquosNet internet access as well. It’s so integrated into the TV’s life that without it that, though I was able to run a video source directly, I couldn’t even touch picture settings.

The thing about thin is that it’s not cheap, and as such, manufacturers aren’t at liberty to cut out performance to slim down the screen. This is probably why the biggest successes in TV sales—Sony, Panasonic, Samsung and LG—haven’t expressed outright interest in marketing slim product. In fact, Sharp is smarter than JVC and Hitachi, aiming the thin concept at particularly spendy customers (Russian oil barons, professional golfers, Alaskan governors who may soon sign book and/or TV deals), rather than just going thin to differentiate itself at the Best Buy.

You Can’t Afford It
The sleek all-metal Sharp 65-inch XS1 Limited Edition costs $16,000. The 52 incher costs $11,000. The build materials have a lot to do with the cost. A critically acclaimed, plastic-encased 3.7-inch thick Pioneer 50-inch plasma (that weighs 13 fewer pounds) lists for around $4,000, and sells for as little as $2,500. So you’re not a sheikh, I’m not a sheikh, why are we talking about a sheikh’s TV? Favia said the company went for a “no compromise” approach, and as hard as I looked, I found just one technical compromise, one most (sheikhs) could live with. If the damn thing didn’t cost so much, the XS1 would be one of my favorite TVs ever.

Speaking of the Kuro, I placed a first-gen model side-by-side to calibrate and compare, and though the Sharp LCD wasn’t always as perfect as the Pioneer plasma, I was surprised to see how well it kept up. Even though the LCD is equipped with 120Hz Fine Motion Enhanced blur reduction, I realized that during the action sequences in Casino Royale it went with native 24p (24-frames-per-second) movie playback. There wasn’t any noticeable blur. In fact, thanks to the massive LCD’s dazzlingly snappy 4-millisecond response time, I found that you really didn’t need 120Hz at all. galleryPost(’sharpxs1highlights’, 4, ‘Sharp XS1 Highlights’);

Contrast Is King
In the all-important land of contrast, this Sharp scores big. Sharp has, in the past, been criticized for confusing contrast with an overuse of darkness. The XS1 is obviously a ground-up redesign, but in that arena in particular, I found I could tweak settings to walk the line between crushed and bleached blacks. You don’t see charcoal gray when you’re supposed to see pitch black, and yet dark textures are plainly visible.

This has much to do with the tight grid of RGB LEDs behind the main panel that light only what’s needed. This technique has recently earned Sony and Samsung high praise for contrast and color reproduction, but it has a third crazy attribute: The 65-inch Sharp is capable of using less energy than the 46-inch JVC and even the 37-inch Hitachi, because it lights only what it needs and doesn’t require the constant glare of a fluorescent light source.

When it comes to specific wattage demands, the Sharp hovered in the low to mid 100s with peaks upwards of 200W. The plasma was averaging 250 or higher, maxing out during the brightest scenes at 400W. The JVC’s 46 incher could be set, using the backlight slider, anywhere from 98W to 200W, and the Hitachi similarly ranged from 83W to 171W. Though nice and slim, both of these sets use constantly lit fluorescent lamps.

While contrast on these smaller TVs didn’t immediately seem as good, I got a sneaking suspicion that LED backlighting is, at least in part, a psychological trick. See, constant FL light means that, when watching 2.35:1 widescreen movies, you get a touch of gray in the bars at top and bottom, at least you do unless you dial down the backlight and sacrifice some whiteness. With LED backlighting, the LEDs behind the letterbox’s black bars are simply turned off. You perceive that contrast to be better since there are fewer dead giveaways of less-than-perfect contrast.

I’m not trying to uncover a mystery here; I’m just saying that once I ignored the light shining through the black bars, I was happy enough with the contrast and color—demonstrated below by Disney’s new Sleeping Beauty Blu-ray, our friend HD Guru Gary Merson’s favorite color-gamut test source along with, naturally, Southland Tales—on both the JVC and Hitachi. Sometimes “good enough” is actually “good.” galleryPost(’ultrathinlcdcompare’, 3, ‘Comparing and Contrasting’);

The Last LCD Issue
The funny thing is that two of the three test TVs suffered from an annoying LCD-related problem, and it wasn’t the cheaper two. Both the Sharp and the JVC, which in many ways could not be more different as TVs, lost color saturation and even shifted in tint when viewed from the most peripheral angles.

Viewing angle issues are far from new: Projection TVs and LCDs have continued to suffer from them for years and years (in some cases decades). And maybe you think that it’s no big deal, since most people watch a TV sitting head on. But I think that ultrathin TVs—intended to hang flush on walls, and without a pivoting mount—should be especially good looking at every angle where the picture is remotely visible. The Hitachi alone managed to hold its colors to the very edge, losing only brightness, as you’d expect.

New Hope
In the end, I think this review session did more to renew my faith in LCD technology than it did to sell me on the whole ultrathin thing. I spent years at line shows wondering why anyone would buy an LCD when plasma was an alternative, and even the amazing rise of Sony and Samsung in the LCD space was clouded by the simultaneous rise of all those extra-crappy savings-club TVs.

It’s worth noticing that these ultrathin sets don’t hail from the current Korean, Japanese or Chinese TV powerhouses. But as flagships from their companies, they do an even better job boding well for the whole industry, at least from a technical perspective. Plasma can still enjoy its high noon, but at a cost—nothing here looked better than the Kuro, but it took twice the energy to deliver that marginally better picture. And when it comes to hanging these bastards on the wall, well, let’s see if Pioneer’s still going to make good on that ultra-ultrathin promise from last CES. If not, these LCDs are going to be the slim-o-cizers to beat. That is, until the first 40-inch OLEDs hit the market. [Sharp Aquos Limited Edition XS1; Hitachi 1.5; JVC SuperSlim]

Ok im wanting to play team fortress 2 and i have found a dell and here are the specs of it 19″ Dell SE198WFP widescreen LCD monitor

Presents 1440 x 900 resolution, 600:1 contrast and 8-ms. typical response rate
Intel Core 2 Q6600 Quad-Core processor
3 GB of DDR2 system memory, 667 MHz
320 GB hard drive
DVD+/-RW drive
19-in-1 digital media card reader
10/100/1000 Gigabit network interface and 56K modem
Connects to the Internet via DSL, cable or dial-up service
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium Edition with Service Pack 1
Additional Specifications
Processor Type: Core 2 Quad
Hard Drive Size: 320 GB
System RAM: 3072 MB
Operating System: Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium
Monitor Size: 19″
Monitor
Diagonal Size: 19″
Processor
Type: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 / 2.4 GHz
Multi-Core Technology: Quad-Core
Cache Memory
Type: L2 cache
Installed Size: 8 MB
RAM
Installed Size: 3 GB / 8 GB (max)
Technology: DDR2 SDRAM
Storage
Hard Drive: 1 x 320 GB - standard - Serial ATA-300 - 7200 rpm
Operating System / Software
OS Provided: Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium
Software: Drivers & Utilities, Microsoft Works 8.0
Graphics Controller
Type: PCI Express x16 - plug-in card
Graphics Processor / Vendor: ATI Radeon HD 2400PRO
Installed Size: 128 MB
Digital Video Standard: Digital Visual Interface (DVI)
Optical Storage
Type: DVD±RW - Serial ATA
Expansion / Connectivity
Expansion Bays Total (Free): 2 ( 1 ) x front accessible - 3.5″ x 1/3H ¦ 2 ( 1 ) x front accessible - 5.25″ x 1/2H ¦ 2 ( 1 ) x internal - 3.5″ x 1/3H
Expansion Slots Total (Free): 1 ( 0 ) x processor - LGA775 Socket ¦ 4 memory - DIMM 240-pin ¦ 1 ( 0 ) x PCI Express x16 ¦ 3 ( 2 ) x PCI ¦ 1 ( 1 ) x PCI Express x1 ¦ 1 ( 1 ) x PCI Express x8
Networking
Networking: Network adapter - integrated
Modem
Modem: Fax / modem - PCI - plug-in card
Mouse
Technology: Optical
Card Reader
Supported Flash Memory Cards: CompactFlash Card type I, CompactFlash Card type II, Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO, Microdrive, MultiMediaCard, SD Memory Card, SmartMedia Card, Memory Stick Duo, xD-Picture Card, Memory Stick PRO Duo, miniSD, RS-MMC, MultiMediaCardmobile, microSD, MultiMediaCardplus, MultiMediaCardmicro, miniSDHC, microSDHC
Miscellaneous
Features: Security lock slot (cable lock sold separately)
Dimensions
Product Form Factor: Mini tower
Width: 7.4 in
Height: 17.7 in
Depth: 17.7 in
Weight: 28 lbs
More Information
Model No.: X420-105W
Shipping Weight (in pounds): 52.0
Product in Inches (L x W x H): 23.1 x 23.0 x 15.1
Origin of Components: USA and/or Imported
Wal-Mart No.: 000527567

NO I WONT BUILD A PC NO NO NO NO NO I HATE IT WHEN PEOPLE TELL ME TO HAVE OSMEONE TO BUILD IT I WILL NOT EVER EVER EVER BUILD ONE OK?! SO IF YOUR GONNA SAY BUILD ONE JUST STFU!!!!!

I recently purchased an Acer 19″ widescreen monitor, and it said to make sure that I’ve installed the latest graphics card driver, and to ensure that my system can support 1440 x 900 resolution. How do I install the latest graphics card driver, and how can I tell if my system can support 1440 x 900 resolution? I have a Compaq Presario desktop, model S5300NX. I will provide more information if needed.
I am currently using Microsoft Vista Home Premium, 32-bit.
When I right click on the desktop, the Properties option is not available, only Personalize. I click that & it brings me to a “Personalize appearance & sounds” page. I clicked Display Settings and in sliding the resolution scale over (which I currently have at 1024 x 768), the next 2 resolutions were 1280 x 1024 and then skipped over to 1600 x 1200.

My kind of aesthetic: these half-LCD, half brushed metal watches that get the tech-futurism across without bashing you over the head with binary-encoded time, 60 LEDs, etc. They’re available in four colors on Etsy, the eBay for homemade goods, directly from the designer in a run of 500 for $185 each, which isn’t bad at all. [Void Watches, Etsy via Technabob and BBG]